Land use and urbanisation in France, 1760-2020 – LANDURB

Over centuries, France has experienced steady urban growth and structural changes, with people migrating to cities where industries and services have developed. The goal of this proposal is to study the rise of cities and how it relates to changes in economic activity and structural change over the 1760-2020 period. The French experience is of interest for Western economies that tend to impose building constraints to limit the physical size of cities, and for developing countries that are confronted with fast urbanisation.
Overall, this project participates to a new research trend on the persistence and growth of cities in a historical perspective that has used so far approximate definitions of historical cities (Allen and Donaldson, 2022). It will propose and test theories of urban growth and structural change consistent with new stylised facts about land use and urbanisation. It will then assess how specific cities and their labour markets were impacted by historical local events affecting agriculture, manufacturing, and technologies.
This project will heavily rely on two new data sources: 1/ Land use extracted at a very fine level (4m x 4m pixels) from Cassini maps (c. 1760), Etat-Major maps (c. 1860), SCAN50 (c. 1960) and BD Topo (2020) and 2/ The municipal socio-economic composition of labour force and inter-municipal migrations constructed from digitised historical individual census registers from 1790 onwards. Thanks to these data, the project will be able to study urban growth since the 18th century using time-varying statistical delineations of cities based on geocoded land use. It will also characterise the labour market across and within cities, as well as migrations to and from cities and more rural places. Finally, it will investigate the long-lasting effects of specific local events (phylloxera pandemic, mining exploitation, and inventors) on local labour markets and city growth.